Dave
“It has taken a while to write up this piece of our adventure – as always the reality of life gets in the way of frivolously made plans. We ourselves like to think we are free-thinking nomads living an intrepid lifestyle when in fact we are not that much different from anyone else – covid taught a cruel lesson to just about everyone on the planet. When we got emergency evacuated from Panama we got to spend nearly two years in England and, I have to tell you, me personally, I loved it. Yeah, we all hated covid for what it did to our way of living, causing frustration, anger and a bad chest when Marie and me eventually got the virus after we snuck off to a music festival. Before that, I got two months legally enforced isolation in wonderful Norfolk and I enjoyed every minute, but the fact was we needed to get Sänna out of Panama if we were gonna make any headway eastwards thru the Caribbean…”
We left the paradise of Panama’s San Blas Islands (described in our previous blog Panama to Colombia) and got pretty much hammered by bad seas while making our way to Cartagena in Colombia. Most mariners will tell you this passage, against the trade winds and currents, is not for the feint hearted but we had become blasé after our long time tied down by covid back in England. It’s fair to say we got slaughtered by the big sea – we lost two sails to rips and a broken shackle which was without doubt the result of degradation through Sanna being stuck in the Vista Mar boatyard for two years of covid lockdown and the worldwide bans on international travel. The relentless heat, humidity and sun invariably have a ruinous effect on sailcloth and, boy, did we pay the price.
Hiding behind all this there were even more dark lurking shadows, back in England tragedy and turmoil was beginning to raise more heartbreaking heartbreak…
Panama to Colombia & Aruba
Having left Colombia by air and leaving Sänna in Cartagena under the guardianship of a Colombian guy named Ruben (more of Ruben later), we arrived in England during the springtime – the favourite part of my anglicised year. Within a few days of stepping off the plane it quickly became obvious that my eighty-nine year old mother was not well. Many of you out there already know the heartbreak of losing a parent so I’m not gonna eulogise on the upset my family went thru. My mother passed away towards the end of April. What made these dark times much worse was that just four days after my mother’s funeral Marie herself began to feel unwell. Yeah, you guessed it, Marie’s first diagnosis was the big one, the one we all dread.
So all our big dreams got flushed aside, everything I loved about returning to my newfound English summers got trashed into the bin. The racehorse racing, the cricket, the music festivals all went onto the back-burner while Marie and I tried to sort out what the hell was going on. The first casualty was our Sänna website and sailing blogs – the stuff you are reading now. Everything I write about our circumnavigation life was written first and foremost for my mother – over many years my mother avidly read and printed every website page and blog post before proudly passing printed copies around all her similarly aged friends. When she died I put down my pen for well over a year, I never wrote a thing, there seemed no point without my adoring mother being able to recount her son’s sailing life to her eager-eared friends. And with Marie’s horrible diagnosis we had more important things to focus on – but at least on this front things eventually worked out reasonably ok.
Right now, making a giant leap and leaving out all the intricate details, everything has moved on. Marie is well on the way to winning her war and I have been encouraged by our website followers wishing to know the latest in our storyline narrative. I really didn’t expect so many of you to get in touch.
So, here we are. This writing piece describes our 2022 voyages and battles – much more detail is readable thru our blog page Panama to Colombia whereas this summary merely brings things to date up to the end of 2022. In actual fact, we are still way behind on our seafaring travels. In the October of 2022 we sailed the boat out of Cartagena to the island of Aruba in the Dutch ABC islands (or the Nederland Antilles by their historic colonial references, but more of this later). Hurricane Julia re-formed in the Caribbean before slamming into Florida, in the process reversing all the prevailing trade winds around Colombia. This gave us an opportunity to make further progress eastwards to the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba but this seagoing passage is itself difficult – commonly referred to as the fourth most challenging sea voyage in the world. Yes – we did it, finally proving Marie’s personal toughness against adversity… but I will leave you here for now.
Please bear with us, we hope to have our blog pages and passage records up to date quite soon.
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